Breaking Down the Walls between Teacher Training and the Rest of the World.

Senesh, Lawrence

Social studies education is irrelevant to most students and will not be improved by either of the two most frequently suggested solutions: teacher accountability and inservice programs. A better way of improving social studies programs is to reform teacher education. Problems currently facing teacher training include indifference on the part of schools and divisions of arts and sciences, artificially created dichotomies between knowledge-centered approaches and student-centered approaches, lack of continuity from elementary to secondary teacher training, absence of a philosophical dimension to most educational research, and a dearth of courses which teach prospective teachers to use new materials. Suggestions for the improvement of social studies teacher training include: schools of education should (1) coopepate with liberal arts colleges to relate social science knowledge to student experience; (2) encourage multidisciplinary social science courses; (3) organize laboratories for applying social science concepts to the K-12 curriculum; (4) serve as clearinghouses for curriculum innovations; (5) encourage research of a more philosophical nature; (6) train education majors to incorporate social realities (unemployment, boredom, migration, future uncertainties) into the curriculum; (7) offer specific inservice workshops designed to bridge the expanding gap between social studies knowledge and the classroom teacher; and (8) clearly define objectives in areas such as methods, knowledge, skills, future awareness, field experience, and testing, and create a system which reinforces these objectives. (Author/DB)